


i'm no good at being kind to myself

by alderations



Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [30]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Depersonalization, Dissociation, Hiding Medical Issues, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mechtober, Medical Conditions, Medical Procedures, Whumptober 2020, a bit of fluff but at what cost, malpractice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27298192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: For the third time today, Brian sets down his spatula and sinks into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, leaning over to rest his arms on his knees. His heart is racing in a way that he hasn’t felt since he was still—flesh. Not human. He’s still human. The pain in his chest is as real as it was when he was entirely biological, as he reminds himself over and over again.(Whumptober Day 30: ignoring an injury/internal organ injury; Mechtober Day 28-31: gold/mechanization)
Relationships: Drumbot Brian & The Mechanisms Ensemble, Drumbot Brian/Jonny d'Ville
Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950916
Comments: 22
Kudos: 115
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	i'm no good at being kind to myself

For the third time today, Brian sets down his spatula and sinks into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, leaning over to rest his arms on his knees. His heart is racing in a way that he hasn’t felt since he was still—flesh. Not human.  _ He’s still human.  _ The pain in his chest is as real as it was when he was entirely biological, as he reminds himself over and over again.

He’s felt off for the past couple weeks, since the EMP that put him out of commission, but he figures that’s to be expected. Chest pain is new, though, and he’s not used to having to sit down and rest after simply walking the length of the Aurora. Robots don’t get tired. But he’ll be damned if he talks to any of the other Mechanisms about it; it’s his problem, not theirs.

That may be more difficult than anticipated. He is, after all, making dinner for the rest of them, and they trickle into the room one by one after he stands and starts stirring the risotto again. It smells delicious, at least according to his mechanical senses, and as he pours the last half-cup of broth into the pan, Jonny sidles up to him to try and get a taste.

“At least use a spoon,” Brian grouses when Jonny tries to dunk a dirty finger directly into the pan. “You’re gonna burn yourself.”

Jonny ignores him, except to rest his cheek on Brian’s shoulder as he licks the sticky rice off his finger. “‘S good. You’ve outdone yourself, Drumbot.”

“Have I?”

“What would you rather I say? That you’ve just done yourself?” Jonny snickers at his own joke, while Brian pretends to be immune to his bad innuendos. “How long ‘til it’s ready?”

Staring into the pan as if it contains the answers to all his problems, Brian takes some measurements with one hand—air temperature, evaporation rate, salinity. He was a good cook even before he was mechanized, but having built-in sensors for these things doesn’t hurt. “Ten minutes at most. Maybe faster if you’re not hanging off my arm the whole time.”

Contrary as ever, Jonny grabs Brian’s wrist and drops to the floor so that he’s  _ literally  _ hanging from Brian’s arm. Brian doesn’t react, because he’s more than strong enough to hold Jonny up with one arm alone, but as soon as Jonny goes limp, Brian topples over.

The end of the wooden spoon in his hand is too deep in the risotto to go flying, though the pan rattles dangerously on the stove until Ivy rushes over to stabilize it, while Brian struggles to get his bearings. He was standing up, stirring, ignoring Jonny, and now he’s crumpled in a heap on the floor with Jonny wiggling furiously under him, and his heart is racing again and he’s too dizzy to see straight, he feels like he’s about to  _ faint,  _ and that’s never happened in this body, and—and—

“Hey!” Jonny interrupts his racing thoughts. “Get  _ off  _ me, you giant lump of brass!”

Brian takes as deep a breath as he can, given the tightness in his chest, and rolls over to let Jonny scramble to his feet. His sensors inform him that Marius and Nastya are standing over him now, muttering to each other, while Jonny storms away cursing, but Brian struggles to see any of them through the fuzz in his eyes.

After another minute of contemplation, Nastya kneels and rests a hand on Brian’s shoulder. “Hey,” she says, barely reacting when Brian’s hand flies up to grip hers. “Are you alright?”

The fog in front of Brian’s eyes starts to clear once he focuses on Nastya’s voice, as if she’s the point keeping him anchored to reality. His pounding heart also appreciates lying down on the floor, apparently, but he credits Nastya for most of it. “I… I’m. No. I’m not alright,” he admits.

“Clearly!” Marius adds. “What’s going on?”

Brian clams up again. As much as he wants them to help, as much as he wants to understand whatever the fuck is  _ wrong _ with him, he can’t force his mouth to move. It’s not until Nastya squeezes his hand, studying his face with patient concern in her frosty eyes, that he’s able to speak. “My heart is… bad? I don’t know. I just… I don’t know what’s wrong.”

At the word  _ heart,  _ he sees Jonny perk up on the other side of the room.

“How long has this been going on?” Nastya asks.

Ignoring the inscrutable look on Jonny’s face, Brian counts the days. “Since that EMP. Two weeks. I—I thought maybe my mechanism was still out of it, but it’s not like when I’m, y’know, around a huge magnet or something. It’s just my heart racing and I keep having to sit down and I can’t breathe and—”

“If you can’t breathe, panicking won't help,” Marius reminds him. “Are you in pain?”

Brian forces himself to nod. Asking for help is the right thing to do, and he knows this, even if he fears that burdening his loved ones outweighs the good.

“Let’s—we can bring you to the medbay, okay?” Marius suggests. “I know you’re probably sick of sitting in there after last week, but then we can at least start to figure out what’s going on, yeah?”

“What about the food?”

Ivy waves him off with the spoon he dropped minutes before. “I’ve got it.”

As Nastya helps him to his feet, one arm around his waist to steady him, Brian watches Jonny flee the room, his face ghostly-pale, and he pushes the wordless fear in his mind aside.

First, Nastya tries running an external diagnostic scan on Brian’s mechanism using her own, more complex cybernetics, but it comes back clear. Nothing mechanical, then. Next, Marius checks him out, though he clearly doesn’t know what to look for, given that he can hardly fake a medical examination on a normal human body. He concludes after a while that Brian has an obvious heart murmur, but he doesn’t know what that means or what to do about it.

At that point, Raphaella shows up, having aptly predicted that Marius and Nastya would not be able to make any headway on Brian’s current condition. After borrowing Marius’s stethoscope for a few minutes, she frowns and folds her wings tightly against her back. “Something’s up with your heart, for sure,” she confirms. “I could do an endoscopy with the stuff I have back in my lab. Or I could just dissect it, but—well.”

The look on Brian’s face is enough to cut off that train of thought. He’s had his heart dissected by her before—they’ve all been Raphaella’s test subjects now and then—but he doesn’t have the capacity to  _ begin  _ to deal with that at the moment. “Let’s try the endoscopy, I guess,” he murmurs.

Raphaella guides him to her lab, her hand in his and one wing braced against his back. They leave Marius and Nastya in the medbay, since Brian can only handle so many people staring at his literal beating heart. “I will have to take it out,” Raphaella warns him as she goes to unlock the door to her lab. “Are you going to be okay with that?”

“Might feel better, honestly,” Brian offers.

When the door slides open, Jonny is sitting on the main exam table, his feet swinging with all his usual wild energy. “What—the door was locked!” Raphaella yells.

“Yeah. ‘Cause I locked it behind me.”

Shoving her surprise back down, Raphaella rolls her eyes and goes to start picking through the supplies she’ll need for the procedure. “Are you here to help, or to be a pain in the ass?”

“Help, actually,” Jonny admits.

Brian joins him on the exam table, if only to stifle the desperate need for comfort that only continues to well up in his throat. The tangled streaks of Jonny’s eyeliner have been wiped away within the past hour, which only makes it more obvious that he’s been crying. When was the last time Brian saw him cry? “She’s gonna do an endoscopy on my heart,” Brian fills him in.

If he’s surprised, Jonny shows no sign.

Thankfully, open-heart surgery isn’t as vulnerable for Brian as it is for the average human. Raphaella unscrews the panelling on the left side of his chest and withdraws the tubular vessel holding his heart, then feeds her endoscope through a valve in the top of the chamber and slowly steers it toward the heart itself. Behind her, the monitor only shows dull gray emptiness until the camera reaches the heart floating in the middle of all his stagnant mechanolymph. The chamber is still connected to his body by dozens of ducts and tubes, their outsides coated in a thin layer of gold that catches the light even as they disappear into the shadows of Brian’s chest cavity.

Despite his prior medical experience, Brian has no clue what he’s looking at. Raphaella, however, moves the endoscope from one chamber to the next, frowning as she studies the frantically-beating blobs on the screen. “One of your valves is almost completely calcified,” she observes after a moment. “I mean—look, barely any fluid is coming through there. I know you don’t really  _ need  _ your heart to move stuff around your body anymore, but that can’t feel good.”

Brian watches numbly as she explores every other nook and cranny in his heart, before finally withdrawing the endoscope and replacing his heart, tubing and all. “So… is that just what happens when you have a heart for a few millennia? Why  _ now?” _

“Not normally.” Raphaella turns off the monitor and pulls up a rolling chair so she can sit facing Brian and Jonny, who remains uncharacteristically quiet. “Otherwise we’d have all kinds of heart failure. This is—it  _ can  _ be caused by certain bacterial illnesses, if they’re not treated soon enough. I assume it’s something your mechanism is usually able to deal with, and it hasn’t been able to keep up since the EMP hit you. The—the good news, in this case, is that you’ve  _ been  _ healing, and hopefully your mechanism will catch up to it before too long.”

After a beat, and then a deep breath, Brian deflates. He’s barely admitted it to himself, but the constant terror of his one human body part failing him has made it hard to function, to say the least. “None of this ever happened when I was hu—before I was mechanized,” he points out.

“Mitral valve stenosis,” Jonny croaks.

Raphaella frowns and turns to him. “Um… yeah? That’s what it looked like. Since when do you…?”

“Since I had it.” Sliding off the exam table, Jonny crosses his arms over his chest and glances between Brian and Raphaella as the numb disinterest on his face gives way to distress. “That’s why I was mechanized in the first place. Doc replaced my shitty heart, and then, y’know, threw the immortality in as a nice  _ bonus.” _

Realization trickles ice-cold down Brian’s spine, and he freezes. “You’re… your heart.”

“My mechanism,” Jonny spits.

“No, your  _ old  _ heart.” Brian scrubs a hand down his face. “Is there any chance Carmilla didn’t, um, dispose of it? We know she kept my bones around. Is—”

Jonny snorts. “Yep. That’s what I’m saying.”

When Brian looks up at Raphaella, her face has gone pale. It’s unusual to see her looking genuinely distraught, though it might just be because she’s caught in the middle of Brian and Jonny’s uncomfortable moment. “I can run a DNA test,” she offers, holding up the endoscope still in her hand. “There should be plenty of cells on this. And I’ve got enough tissue samples from Jonny to build several more of him. Give me fifteen minutes?”

Brian looks at Jonny, taking in the shuddering resolve in his eyes. “Sure.”

While Raphaella fucks around with some complicated machine in the back of her lab, Brian reaches out for Jonny’s hand and crumples a bit when Jonny flinches at the touch. “Sorry,” Jonny mutters, stepping closer to him again. “Sorry, I—this is just… a lot.”

“It’s okay,” Brian replies, trying to sound like he actually means it.

He clearly doesn’t succeed, because Jonny lifts Brian’s hand to his mouth and presses a kiss to his palm in silent apology, before leaning against the exam table and offering his free hand to help Brian replace the plating that covers his heart. Neither of them particularly want to look at the organ, given the circumstances. As Jonny screws every tiny bolt back into place as delicately as his violent hands can manage, Brian watches Raphaella’s wings flare and fold behind her over and over as she runs her hands through her messy hair.

Twelve minutes later, according to his internal clock, she reads something off the machine and turns around. The look on her face says all they need to know.

“I’m sorry,” Raphaella says as she returns to the exam table, visibly distraught. “I—do you two want to… be alone? I can go.”

“That would probably be for the best,” says Jonny, his eyes fixed blankly on the center of Brian’s chest.

After she leaves, Brian collapses. His trembling sobs wrack Jonny’s body as much as his own, as he leans into the smaller man and fails to stifle his tears. Jonny, for his part, just clutches the back of Brian’s vest and holds him as if his own strength can make up for everything Brian has lost.

“Sh-she—I thought—she said she saved my heart,” Brian cries, muffled by Jonny’s shoulder. “Everything froze but my heart. It was still… it was  _ me.  _ How the fuck am I  _ me  _ if there’s none of me left?”

Jonny squeezes him. “I’m sorry. If I had known, I—I don’t know how she managed to keep my fucking  _ heart  _ around for thousands of years without me noticing, but I—I’m sorry, Brian.”

“There’s nothing left. I’m—I don’t remember what I looked like, Jonny. Every time I look in a mirror, I see something else, my face  _ warps  _ and I don’t know which parts came from the real me and which were made up, and the  _ last human part  _ of me isn’t even my own!”

“I’m sorry,” Jonny repeats. “Brian, even if… even if you’re not the person you used to be, I—”

Brian cuts him off with a hand over his mouth, pulling back. “Please don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. It  _ does  _ matter. To me, at least.”

“Wasn’t gonna say that,” Jonny mumbles. “Even if you’re not the same person, I love who you are now. That’s—that’s all.”

Those words are exceedingly rare coming from Jonny’s mouth, and they only make Brian cry harder, his tears staining the smooth metal curves of his cheeks. As Jonny holds him tight and soothes him with words that mean next to nothing, Brian wonders, not for the first time, if giving him the ability to cry was a cruelty or a kindness on the doctor’s part. Maybe it depends what setting he’s on—but no, he can’t think about the switch right now, or he’ll break down altogether.

So he melts into Jonny’s arms and lets his heart be at home.

**Author's Note:**

> WHOOO i've been sitting on this one for Some Time and I was worried that I wouldn't have the motivation to finish it, but making Brian sad is its own reward, I guess. This isn't necessarily my headcanon or something that I think is particularly feasible in-canon, it just hurts and therefore I wrote it.
> 
> I can't tell if I made myself cry because this is sad, or because I'm just having a bad night. Probably both? Maybe this isn't as sad as I think it is. Who knows. Comments, as always, are deeply appreciated. you're all wonderful.
> 
> ETA: Brian’s heart tube was inspired by an incredible piece of artwork by my friend Ellis (@jonny-dykeville on tumblr) from the Aurora Blackbox zine!!!! heart tube lives rent-free in my brain


End file.
